


The images on the surface of a stream

by middlemarch



Series: DeQuincey's iPad [2]
Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Divorce, Doctors & Physicians, Drug Addiction, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 02:49:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7600519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over a year later, Jed is back at work, trying to make things work. A febrile seizure keeps him there late but he's not alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The images on the surface of a stream

He hadn’t recognized her. Not from a distance when he’d walked off the elevator and seen a slender, dark-haired woman moving around the nursing station, not when he’d taken the computer beside her to type up the consult and he’d been able to appreciate the curve of her cheek and the vibrant color of her silk scarf against her fair skin. Her hair had been loose except for where it was held back by combs, a sort of retro nod to the 40s he guessed, and she still had her white coat on, even though it was after 7 and the lighting had been adjusted to suggest evening and winding down to the kids and their exhausted parents. He’d had no reason to hurry home—Eliza had Owen on Monday through Wednesday nights and he’d already Facetimed goodnight with his son and promised macaroni and cheese for dinner on Thursday, shells and not elbows, as long as Owen followed through on his solemn promise to at least try the steamed carrots Jed prepared. 

His two bedroom apartment, which often seemed a little small when Owen was with him, felt like too many big empty rooms when he was there alone and he’d partly bought the overpriced Pottery Barn Kids sailboat bed to prevent himself from sleeping in his son’s bed when Owen stayed with his mother. The glossy-hulled bed did remind him of spending so many summers on the Vineyard, the little sailboat he’d started taking Owen out on with Eliza’s approval as long as he brought Nate or Clare with them; there was a black and white photo of Jed and Owen on the sailboat that Clare had taken, matted and framed above the bed, breaking the darker blue nautical stripe that raced around the walls. Jed had a shot of Owen alone on his bedside table, smiling broadly above the life-jacket, but without Owen in the apartment, the pictures hurt as much as they helped. Jed hadn’t found there was much appeal in living alone; certainly living with Eliza had always been pleasant enough and there was nothing terrifically objectionable about her or that he’d always longed to be able to do that was a surprising benefit of the divorce. It was easier to stay late at work, meet with families a second, more discursive time, or start the last consult that had been called in after 5 by a harried resident. He left early on Thursday and Fridays to make the most of his time with Owen, so it all came out in the wash. The apartment would be empty tonight and dinner was either leftover pasta primavera, no longer very prima, or a frozen dinner, so he’d chosen to stay and work and maybe chance the cafeteria or Au Bon Pain. Well, almost certainly not the cafeteria; there were limits.

The consults hadn’t been very taxing and he was writing them up in a fairly leisurely fashion; it was mid-October and he would have thought the residents might have had a slightly better idea of how distressed to be about febrile seizures (that is, not very for the first one as opposed to how the cases had been presented, in all caps and underlined, toddlers virtually on the verge of DEATH). He actually loved the febrile seizure consults, more so since Owen had been born and he found himself relating to the parents’ icy terror, since the prognosis was so good, the parents easily reassured and generally warmly grateful and the patients, usually under 5, were often back to their boisterously healthy selves by the time he came by. It was a refreshing change from some of the more grim consults he had to do, especially on the pedi-onc service. He was indulging himself more than anyone by writing up the reports late—he could have waited until the next morning and stopped by to talk with the residents who’d put in the consult orders, but the work kept him busy and on these easier cases, he found the residents often appreciated a succinct and uncritical consult, sincerely signed with the polite formality “and thank you for consulting us on this interesting patient.” 

He found dealing with his addiction had made him a better preceptor, more tolerant of the younger doctors’ fears and lack of expertise, and his consult notes no longer contained any scathing comments or references to basic articles or texts that might have been consulted prior to the over-taxed neurology service. He’d said as much to his therapist Charlotte and they’d had a particularly fruitful session discussing what he thought it meant about his feelings about his addiction. He saw her every two weeks and couldn’t imagine when that would ever change; she was far more helpful than the few NA groups he’d tried and she’d given him her cell number to text if he found himself on the verge of a relapse. He’d gotten off the suboxone 3 months ago, though both he and Dr. Diggs had been worried about whether it was too soon. So far, he seemed to be managing, but he’d learned not to get complacent. There had been one night, a few weeks into the suboxone, when he’d gotten drunk on too much red wine, too lonely eating by himself to even finish making the chicken he’d carefully thawed. He’d seen Dr. Diggs the next day and had a crisis session, re-evaluated the suboxone dose and had finally called his friend Jonathan and confided in him about, well, everything. They’d been having dinner once a week since then, or as close to weekly as they could manage and he’d agreed to Eliza’s thoughtful suggestion he try a class at the Alliance Française. It had all helped and he’d discovered that his capacity to be grateful had increased dramatically but Charlotte was pushing him lately on whether his gratitude to others was because he couldn’t forgive himself. She was probably on to something, since she usually was, but he’d allowed himself to send Eliza a small bouquet of irises as a thank-you; he’d purposely sent cut flowers, so they’d die and she could throw them out, the moment passed, not a houseplant that would linger on her kitchen windowsill, a reminder of him she might not want. Therapy was making him re-evaluate his behavior on a daily basis, sometimes leaving him feeling exposed and vulnerable in ways he couldn’t anticipate, but it was probably what made him wait and listen, rather than say anything when the doctor next to him started losing her shit on the phone.

He’d been typing when she picked up the phone after clicking increasingly forcefully on various tabs; she’d even gone over to the rack to flip through a chart, seemingly to check whether something was missing he supposed. He hadn’t really been paying attention when she started talking, just registered somewhere in his mind that she had an appealing contralto voice, when her tone changed and piqued his interest.

“It’s Dr. Phinney. I want the tech who canceled the order, now,” she’d begun, firm but polite. She tried to go on that way but hadn’t managed it.

“I want to know why,” she said, then paused, listening to the tech who had presumably interrupted her. The explanation went on longer than he would have imagined, and it was clear, within a few syllables, that she had definitively passed angry and was frankly livid when she started talking again.

“You had no right! If you thought there was something wrong with the order, you should have paged me, not stopped it… I know you don’t recognize that combination of meds with that infusion dosing, it’s a research protocol we spent seven months getting this kiddo into! This is my patient and I’m the attending physician, I don’t owe you any explanation whatsoever for my orders—don’t you ever, ever dare to do this again, Silas. I’m writing up a formal complaint, this is completely unacceptable!” she finished. She nearly slammed the phone into its cradle, then exclaimed, “Jesus fucking Christ! Misogynist son of a bitch! That fucking asshole!” Her exclamation was not loud enough to disturb the unit secretary or draw the attention of the nurses going in and out of rooms, but was clearly audible to Jed. He watched as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, pinched the bridge of her nose and blew out a long breath through parted lips. She opened her eyes and shook her head a little. Her attempts to calm herself down had been minimally effective it would seem. 

He’d recognized she was Mary, Mary from his first appointment with Dr. Diggs, from the way her voice sounded saying “right” and “wrong,” echoing her declaration to him over a year ago. The different hairstyle had distracted him and he hadn’t been this close to her the last time; now, the setting and her white coat had defined her as a colleague first and the soft wave of her dark hair, the line of her throat and the unstudied grace she had moving around the nursing station had given a second, striking impression of a lovely woman. It wasn’t a thunderbolt moment, more like the fragmentary but compelling return of a dream’s details over the first cup of morning coffee. Quite honestly, that initial encounter had been so awful he’d tried to forget everything that had preceded giving Emma the latte, a hard cut, as if he had just been the nicest patient ever, bringing the receptionist a expensive cup of coffee just because, instead of the nearly howling, aggressive terror he’d been. Emma had been more than gracious and he’d overlaid multiple, more consoling memories of her over the 15 minutes worth of Mary. He’d thrown away most of the memory he had of her, except that boldly righteous voice making a moral directive, and then how much softer it had been when she told him to get something to drink, that he could be okay. He’d remembered those things and her Elsa of Arendell braid trailing over her shoulder. And now he was sitting beside her with a chance to… what? Make it up to her? Get a fresh start? A start at what? Charlotte would probably tell him to stop thinking quite so much about himself and try to think a little more seriously about the woman sitting next to him who clearly was not having a very good day. He recognized the degree of not very good and he felt for her.

“Fuck. Just, fucking fuck, that fucking imbecile. Fuck,” she said in a lower voice, almost a hiss but without a hiss’s directed vitriol. She bent her head and covered her eyes with her hand a moment, forestalling tears or possibly angry laser beams, striving to remain professional even though it was closing in on 8 pm and no one on the unit was paying attention to either of them. Jed angled his cheap rolling chair, hospital standard issue, towards her but not directly; he wanted to convey that he was open to talk but not that he was intruding. It was a lot to ask of the angle of a rolling desk chair.

“Long day?” he offered, making the briefest eye contact and then looking at something halfway between them where he could still see her face but wasn’t challenging her. 

“Is there any other kind?” she replied. 

He waited. It wasn’t clear if she’d want to say anything else, start a real conversation, or accept the question as a non-specific supportive comment from a fellow physician and then ignore him in a neutral, I-have-a-shitload-of-work-to-finish-so-no-offense kind of way.

“I just, this pharmacy tech canceled my orders and then he had the, the unmitigated gall to keep challenging how I wrote them in the first case and now, I’m not sure, but it was a research protocol and if we’re not keeping entirely with the rest of the study, they might pull her. The IRB was brutal on them because of demographics—the study only has kiddos under 5, you know, so rare. Her parents begged me to try and get her in, it’s really her last shot. She’s four and it’s, this is her third recurrence. And now this fucking moron might have screwed it up for her. If this doesn’t work, it’s hospice,” she said. 

He heard the anger first, but underneath she was worried and very sad, afraid of losing her patient more than anything else. Maybe it was because it was late, maybe she was always this way, but he was impressed by how readily she shared not just the exposition of what had happened, but her complex emotional reaction. He sat quietly, looking at her; her hands were still now, off the keyboard, ringless. She raised her eyes to regard him directly and he remembered, yes, her eyes were that dark, her lashes that long. Eliza had made him watch the BBC Pride and Prejudice on repeat it seemed while she was on bedrest when she was pregnant with Owen and it’d been on an infinite loop late at night when she nursed him in the living room—now he heard Colin Firth’s Darcy talking about “the very great pleasure of a pair of fine eyes” and thought he finally understood what Austen meant. As with Elizabeth Bennett, it was not the shape and size, any unusual color, but the vividness of Mary’s expression, the light and shadow, the way she looked so directly but without challenge. 

“Well, in that case, I think you showed a remarkable degree of restraint on the phone just now. I don’t think I could have been so… contained,” he said and paused. He didn’t want her to feel he was trying to pull a fast one or avoid how they’d met, what it meant, so he tried to just own it. “I haven’t been, in the past-- maybe you remember? We met about a year ago—I’m Owen’s dad, the one from the clinic who was losing my… cool and you kind of stepped in, helped work things out?”

“Oh,” was all she said, looking at him not appraisingly or critically, but with consideration, as if she were actively accessing her memory of him and superimposing how he was right now. He tried to sit calmly but it was an effort; he had nothing viable to fidget with, taking a pen out wouldn’t make any sense. Sometimes, he rued the end of the paper chart, it would have been handy to have one in front of him right now. It didn’t seem like she had just internally written him off as an addict, but he braced himself nonetheless.

“You look better,” she said mildly, then leaned back a little in her equally hard chair. He didn’t know if she was consciously trying to set him at his ease, but it worked.

“Thanks, I’ve been working on that. The looking and the being,” he replied. It seemed like she was willing to accept the past and but dwell on it; if only he were as successful. Charlotte would take him to task for that kind of self-talk, he thought, but it was late and it was a relatively minor negative choice. 

“Yeah, and I prefer the bow-tie. The ghosts are a nice touch—are those from Pac-Man?” she said. He marveled a little at her. She’d moved from professionally chewing out the pharmacy tech all the way to gently acknowledging what she knew of him and pivoting past, letting them settle in a pleasantly neutral place; she was allowing him to decide how the conversation would proceed, if it would at all. He started thinking of what Charlotte would say and then his internalized self-object Charlotte herself gave him a side-eye and told him to let his better nature have free rein. He sensed she’d laugh when he told her at the next session which was the extra kick in the pants he needed to… try.

“Yes, mostly Clyde though, he’s the orange one, so it makes it more versatile for Halloween. I’m, my name’s Jed, Jed Foster, I’m a neuro attending but I’m doing some pedi consults part-time, more regular part-time, 0.4 FTE—Leslie Simcoe’s out on maternity leave and I’m covering her plus my own stuff. I thought, you should probably know me as something besides ‘Owen’s dad.’” Had he sounded as awkward to her as he had to himself? 

He suddenly missed resident mixers with their cheap wine and stale crackers that they would have been gobbling up, both already a little loose from being sleep-deprived or hungry or scared shitless after some catastrophe they’d only ever read about that had just unfolded or erupted before them, usually, but not always, including a hemorrhage or having to find a nearly invisible vein for access. It would have been nothing then to say, “Hey, I’m Jed Foster, I’m from Annapolis, I went to Penn for undergrad, what about you?” He’d never used the drugs for this type of situation, a glass of cheap white wine was more than enough liquid courage, so he didn’t miss the pills, but he missed whatever it was that used to make him sail through this part of meeting someone. 

“Yes, it would be preferable to be able to call you Dr. Foster, or Jed, rather than Owen’s dad, in a multitude of situations, I’d imagine,” she said with a smile. A tired smile, but she still looked happier, less frustrated and anxious, more a hard-working woman at the end of a very long day. “I’m Mary Phinney, pedi-onc, and Christ, I’m not looking forward to telling Violet’s parents about why the infusion was delayed,” she added, then yawned. She tapped at her upper lip lightly to cover it and he noticed again the lack of rings or any other jewelry. He thought of the limp broccoli nestled with the multicolor rotini in its Tupperware and how there was not enough fresh grated Parmesan in the world to make it appetizing without a small boy across from him negotiating an extra episode of Word World and decided to take a chance.

“Have you had dinner? I mean, you probably have someone waiting…” he said. He’d been unable to think of a smoother way to ask and at least he hadn’t begun with, “So, do you have a boyfriend?” but he wouldn’t give himself any extra credit points, unless it was for making what probably sounded like a pass to a women who’d met him getting treatment for opiate dependence. 

“Um, no, not really, not besides my cat, Plum. Who has a sort of tenuous regard for me as her human, but not more than average,” Mary said. She looked entertained now, not miffed or offended, so he decided to press on.

“I apologize, I must sound like a total asshole, that wasn’t supposed to sound like a pass,” he said, choosing to just own it.

“It kind of just sounded like you asking if I’d had dinner. Which I haven’t, for the record. I was going to find something at home, honestly, probably a bowl of cereal or some leftovers. Boring but true,” Mary replied.

“I thought, if you hadn’t, this time of night the Au Bon Pain half-prices everything, so it doesn’t feel like as much of a waste compared to the cafeteria, and the soup is actually better after simmering all day. Well, not the potato-leek—that’s like old-fashioned paste by now, that stuff in the little tub with the stick in the middle? But, maybe you want to talk some more about your case or not talk about your case, I don’t know…” he started to trail off, but she nodded and tilted her head a little, encouraging and incidentally, unstudiedly quite pretty.

“My wife, my ex-wife used to basically manage our social life and since the divorce, friends have been a little… thin on the ground. You already know the best and worst about me—that’s not the worst start to a friendship. And I already know you are kind and firm and passionate about your work and you can make the word ‘fuck’ have like 7 different inflections and that’s a damn good foundation for a friendship as far as I’m concerned,” Jed finished.

“So, you’re asking me to dinner and to be friends? Just to be entirely clear?” she said, nearly laughing but not at all meanly. She actually sounded delighted, if Jed could convince himself he knew enough about Mary Phinney and women in general, which was not even 95% on the confidence interval, to say so. He had never liked to bet but he’d already gambled enough, too much, in his life; it was enough so he’d had Owen’s name and a small anchor tattooed on his right wrist to remind him of what he had to put first before he did anything anymore, not willing to risk it without the tangible reminder. But he’d bet Mary Phinney was pleased when she asked him the question and he liked her even more for seeking clarity and her cheerfully amused tone when she did. He nodded at her.

“Then, yes and yes,” Mary said. “But let’s set some ground rules, okay? This isn’t a date, so we’re going Dutch and I will not share my dessert. Actually, that's negotiable but I reserve the right to be greedy. And there will be at least two of those orange scones or the chocolate dipped shortbread cookies after that phone call. I expect to see a half a dozen pictures of Owen but I will not show you any of Plum, nor will I admit I even have any on my phone.” She took a breath and her voice changed, became more cautious and gentle. “I don’t expect you to tell me about everything that happened before, not tonight… I’m not a priest you’re making confession to, but I’ll listen, and trust me, I’m no saint myself.”

Jed wasn’t sure what the hell exactly was going on but it seemed like he’d just won the lottery without realizing he’d even bought a ticket. It had been a long time since he’d tried to make a new friend, a real friend who was a peer, not someone transient at rehab or some chit-chat at Owen’s school pick-up, but he didn’t remember it going like this. He was pretty sure Mary Phinney was supposed to run screaming from him, or at least to retreat and demur, avoid, suggest she had anything better to do tonight than eat over-cooked soup in an overpriced hospital café with a divorced guy with a kid, in treatment for addiction and all the other stuff his therapist pointed out came in its wake or had started it in the first place. She had a decent idea about who he was and she still was willing, actually wanted to eat a bowl of tomato bisque and cookies across from him and talk. She was clearly a very attractive woman and he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t noticed how she looked, how she moved, if he didn’t admit he wondered if she wore perfume and what it smelled like on her skin, but that really wasn’t what he was most interested in. Her manner and tone, the venom of her obscenity and the pain in her voice when she talked about Violet, how she could be gentle and harsh and amused, how quick she was and how bright, those were what drew him, made him suspect he couldn’t do better for a friend than Mary Phinney. He imagined Jonathan nodding and agreeing when he described Mary and Charlotte too. Hell, he thought Eliza would be in favor. The moment was hanging between then as he mulled her over, taking on a significance that was too heavy for what there was.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” he said evenly, trying not to give anything away.

“You already have, but sure, go for it. I may not answer though,” she said, hedging a little, drawing back.

“You still say ‘going Dutch?’ Do you think it’s 1952?”

She laughed then, as he had intended her to, and the air between them was lighter but still with that thrum of energy. He didn’t believe in much, certainly not the higher power that AA and its ilk tried to cram down his throat as if it could replace the exquisite stinging burn that mellowed into a beachy sunshine Vicodin gave him the first few times he’d used it. He believed that science was real and there was no guiding hand tweaking the course of Jedediah Thurmond Foster’s life like it was a cosmic Plinko game. So it was up to him, to not fuck this up, this inexplicable generosity of Mary Phinney reappearing in his life and agreeing to try to be his friend. He was less arrogant than he had been, addiction and divorce and parenthood had a way of doing that, but he felt it wasn’t entirely unjustified for him to think he could make this work without scaring her away or otherwise making her believe he was an unmitigated jackass. He told himself, You can do this, don’t fuck this up.

“Will you maybe consider letting me buy the shortbread? As a friend? Shortbread, especially dipped in chocolate, seems pretty friendly to me,” he said. He was pushing a little to see what she would do, where the inflection point was.

Mary smiled warmly, openly, and moved her pager back to her waistband, a signal she was ready to leave. He noticed that the silk scarf at her neck was a Tiffany window print and he liked the juxtaposition of lovelinesses. His little internalized Charlotte laughed at him, a belly laugh, and reminded him, “Not everybody gets so many second chances, Jed, make the most of this.”

“That might be acceptable—but I’m an awful over-sharer of dessert, so be prepared to split it. And I might get a little rant-y before the sugar kicks in … it’s been a hell of a day,” she said.

“That’s ok. I’ll try to be as good a listener as Plum,” he said. 

Neither of them noticed the knowing glance Isabella and Alice, both regular second shift nurses fixtures on the unit, like the cart of cartoon-patterned gowns or the red kiddie-car bound for Child Life, exchanged. And neither was aware of the bet that was made, how Isabella cleaned up by St. Patrick’s Day, Alice’s quirked eyebrow as she handed over the pay-off, a big Tupperware of caramel-glazed brownies, studded with chocolate and dried cherries like jewels. Their fragrance filled the nursing station like a sigh and no one was unhappy they weren’t tinted green.

**Author's Note:**

> So, here's a sequel to Such Sphinx's riddles, as requested by emmadelosnardos and tvsn. I really wanted it to be about Jed dealing with the ramifications for his divorce and addiction, making a friend and not jumping into a romantic relationship though of course, I hint. I tried to include a few lines from the original show and I've brought Mary's stray calico Plum into the future.
> 
> The title refers to Coleridge's explanation for the origin of his poem Kubla Khan, thought to be inspired by an opiate dream:
> 
> On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!


End file.
